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Anthropologist Tok Thompson joins WIRED to answer the internet’s burning questions about ghost stories and folklore. What’s the oldest recorded ghost story? What counts as a ghost? What’s the difference between poltergeists and ghosts? Answers to these questions and many more await on Ghost Story Support.
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00:00I'm Professor Toke Thompson, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern
00:03California. Let's answer some questions from the internet. This is Ghost Story Support.
00:13First up, I wonder if you know what the oldest recorded ghost story is. I would really like to
00:18know. So we know that from the earliest writings, especially back to ancient Babylonian times,
00:23Sumer, Ur, some of the earliest stories people were writing down were stories about ghosts. So
00:29maybe 3,500 years ago, we have inscriptions of what seemed to be even an exorcism ritual. So not
00:36only did they have ghosts, but they already had ritual specialists that figured out how to get
00:40rid of ghosts. Again, we know that as soon as writing pops up, we've already got ghost stories,
00:44and these are some of our earliest writings. From Anna at LisaAnna, what counts as a ghost?
00:50Ghosts aren't a scientific concept. We've never established them as a scientific reality. So
00:55how do you define something that science doesn't even acknowledge existing? The definition I like
01:00to use is that a ghost is a spirit of a dead person who appears to the living. So this
01:06weeds
01:06out a lot of things that might be other spirits or other demons or ghouls or things that might not
01:11be
01:12the spirit of a dead person. On the other hand, it opens up a lot of possibilities. One example is,
01:17what if the dead person appears to you in a dream? Is that still a ghost? Some people might say
01:22yes,
01:22some people might say no. So again, these are sort of handy definitions, and we like to see
01:27how far we can stretch these. From at Imran Zalmji, how come we don't have ghosts now that are like
01:3490s dudes with backwards caps and s**t? I've been studying those for a while, and one of the places
01:38we really find millennial ghosts is in the internet. It's in the cyber world. We have all these stories
01:43of haunted servers. Minecraft has one of the most famous supposed ghost stories on the internet.
01:49So there are a tremendous amount of new ghost stories, and especially this idea of the cyber
01:54world. Maybe this is where our afterlife is. We have souls maybe trapped on a computer game
02:02or on a server. So I have all these sort of stories I've collected of people getting text
02:06messages from the beyond of their good friends. The online ghosts are all the people that spend
02:10all their social time and their social communications online. So when they die, this is where they haunt.
02:16At your non-showbiz gif, why do people believe in ghosts? I like to always offer the possibility
02:22that, well, one, maybe they're real. Or other suggestions might be something like,
02:26this helps us deal with death. If you believe in ghosts, you probably believe in some sort
02:31of an afterlife. Ghost stories are also a way of establishing ethics as something more than
02:37just transactional. The idea that you can be haunted by your ethical failures if you make
02:41them. There was a great scientific experiment a few years ago. They had these students come in
02:45and do a test. The only catch was that they could easily cheat on the test. And the psychologist
02:50said, okay, you know, please don't cheat. But they kept track of how many students did.
02:53And one group, they also said that, oh, by the way, this room is supposed to be haunted.
02:58The group that felt their room was haunted were far less likely to cheat at the test.
03:03Next question. Clear shakes. One fun theory I've heard why ghost stories became so big in the
03:09Victorian era is that that's when home gas lighting became prevalent. Everyone's getting
03:13carbon monoxide poisoning and hallucinating. It's possible. We know that people did when
03:18they're trying to contact the spirit world. They do try to become intoxicated with various
03:22drugs or gases or whatnot. The Oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece. We know that gases were coming
03:28out. And that has something to do with the participants' experience being gassed. But there's some other
03:33reasons that ghosts became really big during the Victorian era. One of the biggest ones was that,
03:38you know, this is after the Reformation. You have the Protestant versus the Catholic groups in Europe.
03:42And in the Protestant groups, you weren't supposed to believe in ghosts suddenly. That was supposed
03:46to be an old Catholic superstition that, you know, the Reformation was supposed to get rid of. And one of
03:50the big problems is that people kept seeing a lot of ghosts in the Victorian era. What we have is
03:55this
03:55really interesting rise of spiritualism, of seances, of scientific inquiries into ghosts. So maybe ghosts
04:03weren't supernatural. Maybe they were natural. You know, maybe science could prove ghosts exist.
04:08You know, maybe electricity had something to do with ghosts, like Frankenstein. Or maybe x-rays.
04:14Maybe we could take photographs of the spirit world. So there was a heavy blend of sort of
04:18Eastern mysticism and science. The other thing I think I could mention too is the idea of the
04:23Gothic novel, which was huge during the Victorian era. And that's really talking about the fall of
04:28the aristocracy. Charles Dickens wrote a lot about ghosts. So this is a big deal of
04:33Victorian era. And they're becoming a big deal today as well, for different reasons.
04:37At Take That Darwin. Okay, I realize it's customary, if not mandatory, for Christians to believe in
04:44demons and Satan. But how did ghosts get in there? When Christianity started off, one of its main core
04:49tenets is that ghosts weren't supposed to happen. You know, once you die, eventually you're going to go to
04:54the Day of Judgment. So a lot of people were worshiping ancestors and deifying ancestors. And
04:59Christianity would say, no, this doesn't happen. Ghosts aren't real. So this lasts for about 500
05:03years. And then when it spreads into Northern Europe, the Germanic people were very, very much
05:09into their ghosts. And Pope Gregory I said, look, you don't have to change what people do. You just
05:13have to Christianize it. So by the time we get to the Middle Ages, the church has shifted position.
05:18If you see a ghost, you can go to your priest and you can say, hey, priest, I saw a
05:22ghost. And then the
05:23priest would say, ah, yes, you know, that's your grandfather. And he's stuck in purgatory.
05:27And he needs help to bring him up the ranks of purgatory. He needs me to pray for him. Therefore,
05:33you need to pay me to pray for him. So this idea of the sale of indulgences, which is a
05:38big
05:39moneymaker for the church, depended on ghosts now. When Martin Luther started off the Reformation with
05:44his complaints against the church, the number one thing was the sale of indulgences. And very connected
05:50to that, ghosts. Martin Luther said, look, Christians aren't supposed to believe in ghosts. The church
05:55shouldn't believe in ghosts. You know, what are you doing believing in ghosts? This ultimately led
05:59to the Protestant Reformation. And so now you have the Catholic Church that still believed in ghosts
06:03and exorcisms. And the Protestant groups largely denied the existence of ghosts. That started to
06:08change in the American experience around the late 1880s, when you have these sort of newer religious
06:13movements, the Third Great Awakening, as it's sometimes called. Southern Pentecostals, the so-called
06:18Holy Rollers, actually tended to view the world as comprised of demons, of devils. And the devil
06:25is a very active force. So this comes close. But the idea now is going back to this older idea
06:31that,
06:31oh, no, there are no such things as ghosts. It's only demons or devils trying to trick you.
06:37Okay, Styling 1998, Spirited Away. What spirits in the movie are based off of real spirits
06:43in Japanese folklore and Shintoism? Not many. Spirited Away, which is a beautiful movie about
06:49the spirit realm. I think it really captures the look and feel of traditional Japanese folklore.
06:53The idea of the spirit world is not that far away from the human world. You can easily sort of
06:58wander into it by accident. The idea that people could help out spirits in the spirit world, and
07:03sometimes people are necessary to help out spirits. All of this is very, very traditional. The actual
07:09figures, the actual characters themselves, not so much based on actual Japanese folklore. A friend
07:14of mine who's a scholar on Japanese folklore, and he calls this the folklore-esque. You're making
07:20something really feel like folklore, even if it's really not based on traditional folklore.
07:25Another question coming in from engineering number 8660. What cultures do you think have the most
07:32ghost spirit-rich history? A lot of surveys have indicated that by far the majority of
07:38Taiwan believes in ghosts. Probably 90-95% of the population. Which is to say, if you're in Taiwan
07:44and you don't believe in ghosts, you're kind of weird. You're kind of strange. It's worked into
07:48the calendar. You have Ghost Month in Taiwan. You have the big celebrations for the ghosts. In Japan,
07:54very similarly, this is the Oban Festival. It's a bit like American Christmas. Maybe you get days off,
07:58you're supposed to go home with the family. But the other thing is, it's not just your living
08:01family, it's your ancestors. Traditional families would set places out and invite the ancestors to
08:06come in and enjoy a meal and to return and greet their living relatives. You have your wanted ghosts,
08:12like ancestor spirits, and your unwanted ghosts, the ones that tend to haunt us or cause trouble.
08:17These work a little bit differently from conflations of Buddhism and other traditions,
08:21but we have several different types of ghosts. Very often these ghosts are corporal,
08:26so you don't notice they're ghosts at first. Ghosts are a little bit more alive and fleshed out
08:30in a lot of East Asian traditions. You can even have sex with the ghost and have ghost babies.
08:36And so, some people that are remarkable people, people might say, oh yeah, he's got a bit of ghost
08:40in him. This idea that being close to the spirit world and close to the ghost world is also maybe
08:45what makes some people so very special. This becomes a much bigger sort of cultural concern in places
08:51like Taiwan and Japan than we might see in places like America.
08:58At noctivagentpod are poltergeists and ghosts the same thing? And if not, what's the difference?
09:03How can you tell? Poltergeist is a German word that means literally noisy ghost. The idea of the
09:09poltergeist experience is when things are, you know, flying off the walls, objects are moving,
09:14so they're creating a lot of noise. These are noisy ghosts. But some people that believe in poltergeist and
09:19ghosts would maintain that these are not ghosts. That there's just something else involved.
09:22If they're not really ghosts, it's probably telekinesis.
09:28Okay, well then, how come no one ever sees ghosts of animals? The main reason that people don't see
09:33many ghosts of animals in, say, America today is largely an Abrahamic and largely a Christian
09:38nation where we have this idea that only people have souls. A ghost is sort of your soul. On the
09:44other
09:44hand, in societies that are non-Abrahamic, Japan, you have animal ghosts. You look at India, you have
09:51animal ghosts. And if you look at Native American folklore, you have a ton of animal ghosts. And that
09:56goes to these fundamental thoughts, very different thoughts about the soul. And for Native American
10:02societies, you know, does a bear have a soul? Does a wolf have a soul? Yeah, of course. And so
10:06therefore,
10:07if you kill an animal or even harvest plants, Native American tradition, you have to, you know,
10:13say thank you. You have to sort of say grace. You have to pray for it, spiritual journey. You have
10:18to give it some sort of funerary ritual. Or else, you know, something might go wrong and it might come
10:23back and haunt you. This idea of being haunted by ghosts really shaped a lot of Native American
10:28spiritual traditions. At Grace 6569, why do ghost stories always talk about the lady in white?
10:36Why not the lady in turquoise? Or the lady in burgundy? Well, a lot of ghosts show up in
10:40night. And I think maybe white actually shows up better in the middle of the night. So it's a very
10:44sort of compelling imagery if you see, you know, the lady in white in the middle of the night.
10:49We also find in many cultures, especially sort of patrilineal and patriarchal cultures,
10:54the idea of the failed bride becoming a ghost, like the woman who never quite gets married,
10:59abandoned at the altar and commit suicide, this sort of thing. And of course, we represent
11:03unmarried women by wearing white. So there's some very particular things about lady in white that
11:09have a long, long trajectory in European culture. At Dioscuri, I wonder if part of the reason people
11:17tell ghost stories is that it's comforting to think that horrible human suffering leaves a spiritual scar
11:23in a place rather than nature and geography being utterly indifferent to human affairs.
11:28I like to say that history is written by the victors, but ghost stories are written by the victims.
11:33One great example is called Duffy's Cut. This was a valley in the East Coast. Irish-American laborers
11:40came in to work on a railroad. They all died. The local town said it was a cholera epidemic.
11:45They buried them. End of story, except for the next hundred plus years, people kept seeing ghosts
11:51in this valley. And so these stories kept going on and going on and going on. Finally,
11:55just a few years ago, people dug up the graves and they found out these people hadn't died of
12:00cholera at all. They'd been murdered. So yeah, ghost stories do represent assorted history,
12:05the backside of history. At the toughest being, Lincoln, and especially his wife,
12:11believed in occultism. I think they held a seance at the White House. They held many to sort of public
12:16knowledge as mentioned in the newspapers. They would have called it not occultism,
12:21they would have called it spiritualism. So this is kind of remarkable by today's standards. Many,
12:25many people were believing that the spirit world maybe was not so far away and that the dead could
12:30actually be probably pretty easily contacted. So yes, Lincoln and his wife had several seances
12:36in the White House, and this was completely acceptable during that time period.
12:42At Midnighter, why is the American South so haunted all the time? Like why can't they just chill out for
12:47a sec? Ghost stories come out very often of ethical failures. So is the South still haunted by
12:53is slaveholding past? Yes. Okay, I like languages. A lot of Americans are obsessed with paranormal and
13:02haunted locations. Is it the same in Europe? What's Europe's relationship with the paranormal?
13:08Europe's a big place. It's got a lot of different countries. So there's actually a lot of sort of
13:11differences in the different European traditions as well. A good friend of mine actually did a
13:16recent survey over in Iceland trying to figure out, you know, what level of Icelanders believed in ghosts.
13:20And it was somewhere around the 60%, 60 to 65% of Icelanders. This is pretty much like we see
13:26in the
13:26United States. Very, very similar results depending on what survey you look at. On the other hand, you can
13:31look at some countries in Europe that don't have a lot of ghosts. France does not report a lot of
13:36ghosts.
13:36What France does report is a lot of saintly apparitions, Marian apparitions, where they see
13:41Mother Mary. So are these ghosts? They wouldn't say they're ghosts in France. Like, oh no, this is
13:46religion. These are saints. Because some people might not like that word, ghost. Like, oh no,
13:51I don't believe in ghosts. Anything strange ever happened to you? Oh, my dead husband appeared to
13:56me one night. That was lovely. This sort of thing happens all the time. So surveys can be very,
14:00very difficult at figuring out what people actually really believe. What I will say is we can see that
14:05people report on these surveys very, very differently in different European countries.
14:10At Adam Broad, why are houses the ones that are always haunted? Can other living spaces be haunted?
14:15Can I buy a haunted tent? Go on a little camping trip with my new ghost buddy. Adventure in the
14:20woods
14:20and come back home to my little spooky pal in our little spooky place. Can I do that? Please.
14:25Yeah, the haunted house shows up a lot. We live in houses, sort of like we live in our bodies.
14:29There's a lot of metaphors that sort of, you know, associate your house and your body.
14:34Um, so maybe this is where we spend a lot of our time. So this idea that, you know, as
14:39your spirit
14:39leaves your body, it still lingers and very often it still lingers in the house. It also brings back
14:45this idea that these are sort of domestic ghosts, right? If ghosts are often ethical failings,
14:50these are domestic failings. Maybe abusive families or, you know, family murders, stuff like this.
14:57Okay, Reptilian Overlord 20. I am so tired of the horror trope of kids who talk to ghosts.
15:02This pops up around the world, interestingly enough. This could go back to these ideas that
15:06maybe kids are more susceptible to ghostly influence. Maybe they don't have a hardy
15:10adult soul, in a sense. Some people will say, well, kids just haven't learned not to see them.
15:14As adults, maybe we learn to shut them out, but kids haven't learned that yet. And then,
15:19of course, there's also the idea of kids having a very active imagination. So,
15:22kids talking to ghosts is a very, very common motif. I think it brings in a lot of different
15:28thoughts about childhood and about, again, the relationship between kids and the dead.
15:35At Cloakbrand, what is Dia de los Muertes about? Do you celebrate this holiday with your family?
15:40Yes, you celebrate this holiday with your family, ideally. This is a very, very well-beloved festival
15:46in Hispanic communities that was brought into the Catholic calendar. So now it's been moved slightly
15:53to overlap with the Catholic days of All Souls Day and All Saints Day. So long ago, this was probably
15:59developed to move Samhain, the Celtic Halloween, into the Christian fold. So this is why those days are
16:06right at Samhain, at the beginning of winter. And then when they came to the Americas, they put the
16:13Days of the Dead from Central America on this same calendar. So right now, like in Los Angeles,
16:18we have a lot of Hispanic traditions for Days of the Dead. Going on at the same time, we have
16:22Halloween celebrations. So in modern America, Halloween is very often about spooks and being
16:26scared. And the Days of the Dead for Hispanic culture is very, very much about the wanted dead.
16:32There's this idea that, you know, you can keep coming back. You set up a little altar,
16:36ofrenda, and very often with pictures of loved ones, maybe things that they enjoyed. And a lot
16:42of interesting symbolism, like marigolds, which had long been a symbol of the return of the dead
16:48in ancient Aztec and Mayan culture. So Days of the Dead is this wonderful blend of these different
16:52motifs from pre-colonial indigenous traditions, and also very, very contemporary in today's society.
16:59There's a phrase that often goes with it, that which is remembered lives. So your afterlife
17:05depends on the people remembering you. And that's what Days of the Dead is all about.
17:09This is everything I got for today. I hope you learned something. And thank you for watching
17:13Ghost Support.